The ski patrol were paramedics on skis. Several of them came immediately to my side, asking if I was hurt. “No, but I can’t ski down, I don’t think.”
I heard one of them call out to another. “Jesus. Dude, we need him airlifted out of there.”
“We’re going to get you down the mountain, don’t worry.” Two of the strong men lifted me and placed me on a toboggan, which was basically a stretcher with a curved bottom like a sled. Before I could comprehend what was happening, they had strapped me down. I started screaming that I needed to stay, to be there when they pulled Ciaran from the ravine. They exchanged knowing looks between them, which infuriated me further. “What is it? Tell me.” I shouted through tears and grasped at one of their arms. “Please tell what’s happening.”
“It’s going to fine. But he’ll have to be rescued by helicopter. There’s no way we can get to him.”
“I want to wait,” I said. “I’ll wait for the helicopter to come.”
The larger of the two nodded sympathetically, tucking a blanket around me, and explained in a soothing voice that it might take some time and that I would be in the way. “You’ll get too cold. And it could take awhile.”
“He was pushed. Someone pushed him. I need to talk to the police.”
“We’ve already called the police. They’ll want to talk to you when we get off the mountain. While everything’s fresh in your mind. So we need to go now, okay?”
Right, of course. The police. They must know every detail. I relented. And then we were on our way, speeding down the mountain.
Once we arrived at the lodge, not far from where we’d rented my ski equipment, a young woman dressed in fitted black ski pants and a sweater greeted me, introducing herself as Susie. Dirty blonde ponytail, no makeup, freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks, no older than twenty-five with the compact, muscular physique of an athlete. Susie escorted me into a small office, where she helped me take off my boots, goggles, and gloves, then put a mug of hot tea in my hands. Still shaking, I couldn’t bring the drink to my mouth and instead, just stared at it helplessly, unsure what to do.
“They’re airlifting him to Seattle. Harborview Hospital,” said Susie. “They just radioed me to let you know.”
“Airlifted? What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure, Ms. Heywood, other than I suspect he needs surgical attention that the small hospital here can’t provide, so they’re flying him to Seattle as quickly as they can.”
Harborview. Specializing in spine and head injuries. Why did I think that? Had I heard it someplace or was I mistaken? Was it my imagination or did I hear a helicopter overhead?
“But he was breathing?” I asked, my own breathing in question as I waited for the answer.
“Yes, Miss Heywood, but unconscious. We have no idea of knowing what internal or head injuries he’s sustained.” Susie sat next to me and took my hand. “Is there someone you want to call?”
I nodded. Blythe. I needed to tell Blythe and Kevan. My thoughts lurched ahead on high speed. They could meet him at the hospital. I would fly out as soon as I could. Henry would take me to the airport if I could get a flight out. I reached for my cell phone, tucked into the inner pocket of my ski jacket.
Susie left me alone to call Blythe. The minute she answered the phone I started blubbering incoherently. Somehow she was able to decipher where I was and what had happened. “What were you doing skiing with Ciaran? Have you been spending time with him?”
“I’ll explain everything when I get there,” I said.
“Please tell me you’re not involved,” she said.
“Blythe, please, just go. I can’t get there for hours and I don’t want him to be alone.”
“Oh, Bliss, what’re you doing?” She paused. Even over the phone I felt the internal conflict she was experiencing—wanting to know more but understanding that it wasn’t the time to ask. “We’ll head to Harborview now.”
I called Henry next. He promised to come get me and offered to look into flights. “Just stay put. We’ll be right there.”
A police officer came into the office next and asked me questions. I tried as best I could to answer everything and tell him in detail what I remembered, knowing that I was the only witness to what had happened. He asked me a series of questions about whether Ciaran had enemies and all of the things one expects if there is suspicion of foul play. I told him everything I knew, including that Ciaran suspected someone had been trying to harm him for years but that he had nothing but anecdotal evidence and no clue who would want to hurt him, having no known enemies. It struck me that the cop didn’t dismiss the notion, and that he seemed to believe there was validity to my story, including my assertion that Ciaran had been pushed.
“Is it hopeless?” I asked at the end. “With no leads, will you ever be able to solve this?”
“I won’t lie. We don’t have much to go on. But I will say this, Ms. Heywood. In cases like this, it’s almost always someone the victim knows, someone in their inner circle. If that’s the case, we have a much greater hope of solving this.”
* * *
I arranged to take the next flight out of Hailey for Seattle. Henry and Mrs. Pennington picked me up in the town car, and we went back to Ciaran’s so I could pick up clothes and toiletries before going to the airport. I had calmed enough by then that I was able to tell them what had happened as we sat in the small Hailey airport waiting for my flight.
As I told them everything, Mrs. Pennington held my hand, like Blythe used to when I was a child. I leaned my head on her shoulder. “I love him. I was pretending to myself that it was just a fling, but when I saw him there, hurt and helpless, I knew.” I started to cry again, and she gathered me into her arms.
“I know you do, dear girl.”
“I’ve never felt so scared in my life,” I said.
“He’s young and strong,” said Henry. “He’ll fight like hell.”
“Especially knowing you’re waiting for him,” said Mrs. Pennington.
“That’s just the thing,” I said, crying harder. “That won’t matter to him one bit.”
Henry smiled at me, kindly. “I’m not quite sure you’re correct, Miss Heywood.”
“Just go to him,” said Mrs. Pennington. “Being there will help him, I’m certain of it.”
Chapter 28
BLYTHE AND KEVAN were waiting for me at the hospital, both pale and visibly shaken. They’d arrived just a few minutes after Ciaran was brought in and had been waiting in the lobby of the surgical ward during the three or so hours it had taken for me to arrive.
Ciaran was in surgery, they told me. Internal bleeding that needed to be located and repaired. His legs were broken in multiple places, as were several ribs. His right arm was shattered and would need intensive surgical repair.
“What about his head?” I asked.
“Trauma there,” said Kevan, his voice cracking. “They don’t know the extent of it yet. They don’t know if he’s going to live.”
“No. No. He has to,” I whispered.
“Bliss, tell us what happened today. Every detail,” said Blythe.
We sat, and I went through it as carefully as I could, including his suspicions over the years that someone had been attempting to harm him.
“What’re you talking about?” asked Kevan. “He thought someone was trying to kill him?”
I nodded. “I don’t know if this is my place to tell you, but it’s been going on for years. It’s shaped all his decisions.”
“What do you mean?” asked Blythe.
“For one, his lack of commitment to anything but his charity causes. And ticking things off his adventure list. He’s felt certain that he’ll die young.” I started crying, but continued. “He’s alternated between questioning his sanity—wondering if he was simply certifiably paranoid—or if it was true, that the inciden
ts over the years indicated there was someone trying to kill him. Either way, it’s kept him from close relationships. Romantic ones, in particular.”
“Why would he keep this a secret from us? Why did he tell you and not me, or Ardan?” asked Kevan.
I reached into my jacket and pulled out a crumpled tissue to blow my nose. Behind us, we heard someone asking the front desk nurses questions about their loved ones. “I’m the only one he’s ever told.”
Next to me, Blythe took in a deep breath. “Because you two are in a relationship. You’re sleeping together.” My sister’s eyes were red. Obviously, she’d been crying.
I went hot, knowing I had to confess. “Yes. It just happened. We didn’t mean for things to go that way, but, well, they just did.” Even as it was out of my mouth, I realized how trite it sounded.
“But why didn’t you tell me?” asked Blythe.
“Because it isn’t going to go anywhere, and we didn’t want everyone to be awkward.”
“For heaven’s sake, Bliss, you’re sleeping with my future husband’s brother. It’s not like you won’t see one another again. Did you think through the consequences of this?” Blythe’s voice was loud and an octave higher than her usual soft way of speaking. She peered at me with a horrified expression as her fingers clutched and unclutched the collar of her blouse.
“I did. I tried to resist him, but it was impossible.” Angry, hot tears fell down my cheeks. I swiped at them with my hand. “You have no right to judge me.”
“Blythe, she’s right. Of all people, we know it’s impossible to choose who we love,” said Kevan. “I mean, look at us. It wasn’t exactly without complications.”
“It isn’t the same thing at all,” said Blythe, waving her hands in the air like she was swatting away a nasty fly. I’d never seen her as angry. “So, what, this was just a fling? Some fun?”
“It was supposed to be. But the plan went off the rails a bit,” I said.
“You’re in love with him,” said Blythe. A statement of fact, as only a sister could level.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I don’t want to be, but I am.”
Blythe sighed. “Oh Bliss.”
“We agreed to just spend the holidays together. Enjoy some time off. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with him. Anyway, he’s incapable of loving me back. Knowing someone was trying to harm him made him crazy, always looking over his shoulder, assuming he could die at any time. And now, I’m worried that whomever was trying to kill him might have succeeded.”
I looked up at Kevan. Tears brimmed in his eyes. He reached for my hand. “Bliss, you have to remember, Ciaran’s a fighter. You don’t grow up the youngest of four rough boys and not be a little tougher than the rest. And if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll fight to get back to you, regardless of this ridiculous notion he has about being incapable of love.” He stood. “I have to call Ardan and Teagan. Neither one of them will be able to make it here quickly. Ardan’s overseas, and Teagan’s, well, God knows where. We never know. But they should be on alert, in case…” He trailed off and then hurried toward the doors.
“You’ve never lied to me before,” said Blythe. Her voice was no louder than a whisper now; the anger seemed to have subsided as quickly as it had flared. She sat looking at me, her face slack like a popped balloon.
“I didn’t think you’d understand, and apparently I was right,” I said.
“What I don’t understand is that you lied to me. The other thing, well, Kevan’s right. You don’t choose who you love. It just happens.”
“I’m sorry I lied,” I said. “The whole thing has turned my world upside down. I love him so much it hurts.” I started to cry.
“Well, I understand that,” she said. For the first time, I noticed that we were sitting on a couch. Like when we were children, Blythe took my hand, and we sat like that for several minutes. Only today, I cried hot tears that seemed impossible to curb, as if the grief from forty years had welled up behind my eyes and was now unleashed.
My father came into my mind with a suddenness that surprised me. I was nine years old that day he became a real ghost, dying quietly and without fuss in a car accident, a shadowy lurker both in life and death. Blythe was fourteen that year. What did she remember of it? Had they taken him to the hospital when he died? Was he killed instantly, or was he in surgery as Ciaran was now? How was it I did not know these facts?
“Blythe,” I said now. “The car accident—our dad—did he die right away?”
She flinched. I’d startled her. “Yes. It was instant, according to Nannette, anyway.”
“Why didn’t I go to his funeral?”
“There wasn’t one. Nannette cremated him, and that was that.”
“How old was he when he died?”
“Thirty-six,” she said.
“I have almost no memory of him. It’s like looking into the fog, knowing there’s a figure there but not being able to see it. I regret it, you know. Not spending time with him. I feel like I squandered the chance to love him.”
“Well, he was a hard person to know. I’m not sure I knew him much better, even though we spent a lot of Sundays together. Anyway, Dad was the one who should have insisted he see you. He was the grown-up. You were a little girl who should not have been allowed to dictate the relationship. It wasn’t your fault.” She squeezed my hand tighter. “And if Sally were any kind of mother, she would’ve known that a relationship with your father, regardless of your feelings toward him, is important to a little girl. His absence influenced who you became. They squandered love, not you. They taught you how to deny love, to seek everything but love. You should have been cherished. I wasn’t enough.” Blythe was crying now, too, and stroking my hair.
She was right about Sally. Our mother spent the better part of her life pleasing herself while hiding behind her flimsy principles, principles born of an era where free love, self-expression, and mind-expansion were sought after and valued more than what she would describe as the mundane ventures of commerce, hard work, and family.
Blythe was right about me, too. I was a survivor, meeting my parents’ squandering of love with equal scarcity. I learned to keep love hidden, to squelch it and waste it, choosing business over relationships, career over love. I put everything I had into our American version of success. And damn, I was good at it. For years and years, I was good at it.
The problem with squandered love, I thought now, crying in the arms of my sister, is that it has a way of capturing you eventually. When you’re a child, even a young adult, the power of your moral convictions, your indignant assurance that you’re righteous and wronged is enough to fuel a life. But after a time it occurs to you that your choices have rendered you a ghost. All the ways you’ve rejected love out of fear are a boiling pot of regret, for at the end, when we have nothing but our memories, we know then that all we wanted was to love and be loved. It is all that matters, all we’re left with at the end.
Perhaps that was it, I thought. When a life, like a sweet perfume, was boiled down and distilled into the essence of what mattered, its fragrance was the thing of importance, the sweetness that remained, not the process itself. What would we think of at the end of our lives? What memories would emerge? I suspected it was the smallest of moments. The sound of the screen door slamming, letting you know that someone you loved had arrived home. The scent of lilacs along a country road on the drive to school. Dancing in the kitchen with your sister. A beloved niece twirling in her tutu. The way he reached for the radio dial to turn up a song he liked. His arms reaching for you during the dark night when the demons wanted to snatch you. I got you.
“You want to know what I remember?” I asked, swiping at the tears that fell down my cheeks.
“What’s that?” She spoke softly, resting her head against my shoulder.
“I remember how you made my sandwiches every day with just the right am
ount of peanut butter spread evenly across the bread, and how you saved the strawberry preserves for me, even though you loved it.”
Blythe kept her head on my shoulder. “I had to hide the preserves from Sally in an old coffee can in our room. One jar lasted a month if I saved it only for you. I worried all the time if you had enough to eat. When you got home from school you always had these dark circles under your eyes, and you were so skinny. I learned to cook to try and fatten you up.”
“After you left home, you can’t imagine how I mourned those sandwiches.”
“We’ll have them again. Ciaran will get better and we’ll have them together. All of us.”
“He loves peanut butter as much as I do.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t love you?” asked Blythe.
“I can’t let myself hope that he does.”
She turned on the couch to face me, taking my other hand so that she held them both. “Bliss, I’m not always right about everything, especially as it relates to men. Need I remind you of my former husband? But sometimes you just have to go with your instincts, no matter what your head or your cautious older sister tells you.”
“I just want him to live, even if I can’t have him.”
“That, Bliss, is love.”
We went back to sitting side by side, Blythe still holding onto one of my hands.
“Who would do this to him?” she asked me, after a few minutes passed. “Who did this to him?”
Just then, Hope Manning walked through the emergency room doors.
Chapter 29
SHE WAS ALONE, dressed in dark glasses and hat, just as she was the first time I’d ever met her, making her unrecognizable unless you knew who you were looking at, as I did. It appeared she knew I would be waiting from the way she charged toward us with no hesitation. I sat up straighter, causing Blythe to look at me strangely. “It’s Hope Manning,” I whispered in her ear.
Blue Moon (Blue Mountain Book 2) Page 25
